Multimedia has officially graduated from a niche technology that a few geeks were experimenting with into a full-fledged industry. The gargantuan size of disk storage on PC systems adapts well to this application, but embedded systems usually have to be a bit more cost-conscious. An important tool in this quest is the proper selection of media encoders.

Video is the ultimate disk hog, especially if you use formats like MPEG-2. This standard format is very easy to render, but eats disk space at a prodigious rate. A very real alternative is the newer MPEG-4 format, which does a much better job of compressing the video. This format has been much more limited in terms of interactive features, but at least one vendor of encoder software has added that to the mix. The new Divx 6 interpretation of MPEG-4 offers one of the few alternatives to the Windows Media Format for encoded video that must live within sane disk space limits.

There is a tradeoff, however (Isn’t that always the case?). MPEG-4 requires a lot more CPU power to decode, and the format is subject to the same kind of variations within the standard that plagues versions of MPEG-2 to this day. Even so, the formats are a lot more mature and accessible than they have been. And again, there is always the default Microsoft option.

Larry Mittag